Thunder Enter 2023-24 Season With League-High Eight International Players

On Tuesday, the NBA regular season officially kicked off, as the Phoenix Suns took down the Golden State Warriors and the defending champion Denver Nuggets defeated the Los Angeles Lakers.

Ahead of the league's first games of the year, the NBA released statistics detailing the prominence of international players across the association. On opening day rosters, there is a record 125 international players representing 40 different countries and territories.

These numbers indicate that basketball is truly a global sport, and that the rest of the world is rapidly improving their development systems and skill levels. For an illustration of just how dominant international players have been in the past five years, look no further than the MVP race.

James Harden is the last American-born player to win the MVP, back in 2018.

Since then, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid have all taken home the award with other international players like Luka Doncic and even Shai Gilgeous-Alexander making appearances on MVP ballots.

Just this summer, Victor Wembanyama became the first French player to be selected with the No. 1 overall pick.

There is no doubt that basketball is quickly expanding, and Oklahoma City General Manager Sam Presti has fully embraced the game's global growth. At the start of the 2023-24 NBA season, the Thunder and Mavericks both hold a league-high eight international players on their rosters.

For OKC, Davis Bertans, Lu Dort, Gilgeous-Alexander, Josh Giddey, Vasilije Micic, Aleksej Pokusevski, Ousmane Dieng and Olivier Sarr all came from outside of US borders to play in the Modern Frontier.

The two nations with the most representatives in the NBA other than the United States are France and Canada. With Dort and Gilgeous-Alexander (Canada), as well as Sarr and Dieng (France), the Thunder have two players from both of the aforementioned countries.

Oklahoma City also has two Serbian players (Pokusevski and Micic) as well as one Australian (Giddey) and one Latvian (Bertans).

The Thunder will be relying heavily on a large handful of these players this season, as Gilgeous-Alexander, Giddey and Dort should all be in the team's starting lineup on Wednesday night when OKC heads to Chicago for a matchup with the Bulls.

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